Acting C.I.A. Director Disputes Depiction of Torture in \'Zero Dark Thirty\'

The trailer for “Zero Dark Thirty” says, “This is how it happened.”

“I would not normally comment on a Hollywood film,” reads the first line of a statement released Friday afternoon by Michael Morell, the Central Intelligence Agency's acting director, directed at employees but posted on the agency's Web site, “but I think it important to put ‘Zero Dark Thirty,' which deals with one of the most significant achievements in our history, into some context.”

The film, a dramatization of the years-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, which ended with his death in a house in Pakistan in May 2011, has caused significant controversy focused on scenes that depict vital intelligence being gained through torture.

Mr. Morell joins senators briefed on the intelligence gathering in condemning the idea that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were central to killing Bin Laden.

Although the C.I.A. “interacted” with the filmmakers, Mr. Morell said, he wanted to draw attention to the “significant artistic license” the film takes “while portraying itself as being historically accurate.”

It would not be practical for me to walk through all the fiction in the film, but let me highlight a few aspects that particularly underscore the extent to which the film departs from reality.

- First, the hunt for Usama Bin Ladin was a decade-long effort that depended on the selfless commitment of hundreds of officers. The filmmakers attributed the actions of our entire Agency - and the broader Intelligence Community - to just a few individuals. This may make for more compelling entertainment, but it does not reflect the facts. The success of the May 1st 2011 operation was a team effort - and a very large team at that.

- Second, the film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Ladin. That impression is false. As we have said before, the truth is that multiple streams of intelligence led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was hiding in Abbottabad. Some came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well. And, importantly, whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from t hose detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved.

- Third, the film takes considerable liberties in its depiction of CIA personnel and their actions, including some who died while serving our country. We cannot allow a Hollywood film to cloud our memory of them.

In a brief interview with my colleague Scott Shane, the film's screenwriter, Mark Boal, defended the treatment of torture.

“I'm trying to compress a program that lasted for years into a few short scenes,” he said. The film, he said, attempts “to reflect a very complex debate about torture that is still going on” and shows brutal treatment producing both true and false information.

The film, released nationally this week, has reignited a debate over torture. In 2009 Ali Soufan, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent involved in investigating Al Qaeda who had objected to “enhanced” techniques, wrote in an Op-Ed article for The New York Times that the techniques had not yielded the vital results their proponents had claimed.